Former top defence official defends handling of F-35 file, blames Harper government secrecy

F-35: Former top Defence official blames Harper government secrecy

OTTAWA – The man who for seven years oversaw billions of dollars in military contracts and purchasing is defending the way he and his Defence Department staff managed the F-35 stealth fighter program.

In his first interview since retiring from the public service on Jan. 2, Dan Ross, the former assistant deputy minister of defence materiel, blames the Harper government’s culture of secrecy, and a lack of accountability at all levels of government, for the project having run so disastrously off the runway.

At the same time, Ross provides an explosive window into a military procurement system that has ground to a halt thanks to infighting between bureaucrats, and which he says threatens to leave the country’s men and women in uniform without the equipment they need.

And he firmly believes that – Conservative government review or not – the F-35 will be Canada’s next fighter aircraft, unless politics get in the way.

“At the end of the day, the Royal Canadian Air Force will fly F-35s,” Ross says. “If we have an Air Force that flies fighters.”

Ross joined the Canadian Forces as a fresh-faced Saskatchewan farm boy in 1972. He rose through the ranks as an artillery officer and retired as a brigadier-general before joining the public service as a civilian.

There, he served in a number of senior management positions before being tapped in May 2005 to become the assistant deputy minister of defence materiel – known in defence circles by the acronym ADM-MAT.

The ADM-MAT is one of the most powerful public servants in Canada, in part because of the sheer amount of money that flows through the office: Ross managed a staff of 4,500 while overseeing $6 billion in discretionary spending every year.

This included not just purchasing everything from boots and rations to tanks and surveillance satellites, but also maintaining and disposing of every piece of military equipment.

Given carte blanche by the newly elected Conservative government in 2006 to re-equip the military, Ross is credited with shepherding the purchase of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment — from armoured trucks to used Chinook helicopters — often transferred direct from the stocks of the U.S. or allied militaries.

The former brigadier-general viewed his role as first and foremost making sure these soldiers had the best equipment possible – not just to succeed at their missions, but to come home from Afghanistan and other “rat-holes” in one piece as well.

“You don’t want to be slightly worse than the other guy,” Ross says of equipping soldiers for combat.

“You actually don’t want to be equal to the other guy. You want to dominate him and kill him and he never knows he’s been killed. That’s what you need to be when government asks you to go someplace that’s really hard and really dangerous.”

That, he says, meant not always settling for “lowest-price garbage.”

“If you want to buy staff cars or furniture based on price, that’s okay. Who’s going to live and die with the furniture?” he says. “If you’re buying a weapon system that our troops live and die with, that’s not acceptable.”

There have been some, such as Ross’s ADM-MAT predecessor Alan Williams, who felt Ross was too willing to give in to what the military wanted, even if it meant reducing competition.

Ross says there were many times he pushed back on the Army, Navy and Air Force because their requirements for a piece of equipment were unreasonable or limited competition too much. But he also dismisses the argument — which he says is prevalent in official Ottawa — that competition is “sacrosanct,” especially when lives are on the line.

“When lives are at risk, where there’s only one supplier (or) you’ve got to get it done, and you’re going through this enormous conversation about how evil sole-sourcing is, that’s not appropriate,” Ross says.

“And you may pay a bit more, but that’s okay because you’re doing it for a reason.”

Canada’s involvement in the U.S.-led F-35 stealth fighter program, which started in 1997 when the Chretien Liberals paid $10 million to get Canada involved in the project, pre-dates Ross’s time as ADM-MAT.

Yet in a scathing report in April 2012, Auditor General Michael Ferguson slammed the way National Defence managed the program from 2006 to 2010 — the time when Ross was in charge.

Ferguson said officials failed to communicate the F-35’s risks, including escalating costs and schedule delays, to Parliament and decision-makers.

Ross says National Defence had all the information — but the Harper government’s wouldn’t let officials go public with it.

“For seven and a half years, whenever a journalist asked to do an interview, it was denied,” he says.

“The Defence Department doesn’t communicate and it asks the (Prime Minister’s Office) for permission and they say no, and no one ever communicates.

“If we’d had a tech brief bi-weekly that had the good news and the bad news, the facts, went through costing in great detail, I don’t think you’d be in the same place,” he says.

In the lead-up to the 2011 federal election, Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page asked officials in Ross’s section to discuss the true cost of the F-35 program as he prepared a report about the stealth fighter’s pricetag for Parliament.

Ross says he never received approval from above for the meeting.

“At the end of the day, communications in federal governments is a political decision,” he says. “Bureaucrats don’t get to decide.”

Page’s report, released in March 2011, estimated 65 F-35s would cost taxpayers nearly $30 billion to own and operate over 30 years.

That report served as an impetus for the election called two weeks later, and in which the F-35 figured prominently.

National Defence released numbers last month putting the estimated full cost at nearly $45 billion over 30 years.

The Auditor General also found the decision to go with the F-35 was all but made in 2006 when National Defence persuaded the Harper government to sign onto a memorandum of understanding confirming Canada’s continued involvement in the program.

The next four years, Ferguson’s report states, were spent justifying the decision to government, which was not made aware of the fact that by signing the MOU, it would be extremely difficult to go with another option.

Ross admits proper documentation wasn’t kept as National Defence zeroed in on the F-35 as Canada’s next fighter between 2006 and 2010, but says that is being corrected now with the Conservative government’s “reset” of the project.

“What we said to the guys is ‘really be rigorous in all of this and document the hell out of it,’ ” he says. “They did it before. Did they document it sufficiently? Probably not.”

At the same time, he says while Boeing was in constant contact with National Defence about its Super Hornet fighter jet, other companies such as Eurofighter were nowhere to be found.

He makes no apology for letting the Air Force draw up requirements for its next fighter aircraft and singling out the F-35.

It’s so difficult to move any program right now

“The whole town is convinced that the military cherry-picked their specifications to buy this special thing, this one-of-a-kind thing and somehow that’s wrong,” he says.

“(The military) get to freakin’ say. They get to say what they need because they live and die with what we get them. Nobody else does. And so they get to say.”

Ross says this was “grudgingly” accepted by politicians, the media and bureaucrats in other departments during the war in Afghanistan, but now “the processes and bureaucracy and resistance (have) ramped up.”

He laments what he sees as a procurement system that has become jammed by red-tape and bureaucratic infighting, which threatens to push project schedules and leave Canadian troops without the equipment they need.

“Over the last two years, as I’ve watched this system almost come to a dead stop, it’s so difficult to move any program right now,” he says.

He estimates infighting between departments has pushed the average large-scale military procurement project from a four-year time-frame to 10 years.

Still, he firmly believes the Harper government’s decision to restart the process of choosing a successor to the CF-18 will vindicate the decision to choose the F-35 in 2010 — unless politics get in the way.

“There will be so much heat and light put on the (re-assessment), both politically and by bureaucracies,” he says. “I’m not sure how it’s going to survive all that scrutiny before it goes public. I have no idea what Canadians will get to see.”